Abstract

Robotics studies have developed at many places across the globe
and explored many different approaches. Among others, Japan has been one of the
leading countries promoting robotics studies, breaking new ground with
establishing Human Robot Interaction as an international society and leading the
world with very human-like Geminoids. In the 1940’s, Masanao Toda, a
founder of cognitive science in Japan, proposed a visionary robotic system to
explore and understand the function of emotion as a trigger of cognitive
mechanisms for survival. For example, when a human was exploring in the ancient
wilderness, fear must have worked as a switch between the exploratory mode and
the find-an-escape mode to promote survival. The thought-experimental robot, the
Fungus Eater, seeded some of the early AI research when it was introduced to
psychologists in the U.S. and the Netherlands (Toda, 2000, 1982).